We’ve all heard that digital business transformation is upon us. Organizations are transforming processes and business models in order to get to market faster and foster innovation. Disruptive business models are replacing established players, from Netflix vs. Blockbuster to Uber and the taxi industry; we’re all familiar with the many proof points.

An important step in this digital business transformation is to build a digital workplace that helps achieve team goals, fits with the company strategy and facilitates business agility. This is where desktop and app virtualization has a big role to play by providing secure access to core business applications to a mobile and elastic workforce.

By decoupling the applications from the end device and keeping data safely in the data center organizations can provide their employees, partners, contractors the right tools to get their job done the way they want and IT can concentrate on helping grow the business rather than spend time updating OS on end points.

Citrix Synergy

What better place to showcase what Cisco’s infrastructure has to offer for desktop and app virtualization than Citrix Synergy? This year Cisco will present a number of exciting Citrix-based solutions that help make the digital workplace a reality.

First, we have a new Cisco Validated Design (CVD) for 5,000-seat XenDesktop/XenApp implementation on all-flash FlexPod that provides an enterprise-grade, pre-integrated solution for large scale deployments. See CVD here.

Then we have a winning combination with a 2,500-seat SmartStack VDI deployment on XenDesktop coupled with a 500-seat bare-metal XenApp RDS deployment on UCS M-series. This solution uniquely matches the right Cisco platform with the workload to provide higher desktop density and great TCO. See the CVD here.

A common theme in these two CVDs is the incorporation of graphic acceleration to deliver superior user experience. We used the NVIDIA M6 TESLA card with GRID 2.0 on UCS B200 M4 blade servers on both the FlexPod and SmartStack solutions. On the UCS M-Series M142 cartridges we used the Intel Iris Processors for graphics support to provide graphic acceleration to XenApp workloads.

Cisco Infrastructure for VDI

The strength of Cisco infrastructure for desktop and app virtualization is the breadth of our portfolio. We cover everything from component based solutions with our blade and rack servers, composable infrastructure with the UCS M-Series modular server, edge-scale computing with the UCS Mini and converged infrastructure with FlexPod (NetApp) and SmartStack (Nimble Storage). And we recently introduced Cisco HyperFlex Systems, our hyperconverged platform to round up our offering.

Cisco HyperFlex seamlessly unifies networking and compute with a next generation data platform enabling end-to-end simplicity for IT velocity. It is a purpose-built, high-performance distributed file system delivering a wide range of enterprise-grade data management and optimization services.

We will also be showing a HyperFlex demo in our booth as well as the actual gear. Also in our booth, we will be demoing our solution for graphic-accelerated VDI using NVIDIA GPU cards along with our FlexPod and SmartStack solutions based on our recently released CVDs.

There’s never been a better time for desktop and app virtualization. So come by the Cisco booth at Synergy and catch a session in our mini theater, you’ll get a Starbucks gift card and be entered into a drawing to win a $50 Visa gift card. Stop by our demo pods and talk to our experts about deploying XenDesktop and XenApp on Cisco UCS and HyperFlex. Check all the details here.

If you are attending Citrix Synergy and want to find out about Cisco UCS M-Series Modular Servers, I'll be there with Darren Anthony & Jeff Nichols.
Come find us and let's discuss how M-Series can help solve your problems.

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